In addition to Spotify, it had amassed a wide range of customers for its music personalization and discovery technology. Some of those, today, are direct competitors of Spotify’s. They include Clear Channel’s iHeartradio, Beats Music, Rdio and SiriusXM.com — as well as others like the BBC, Foursquare, MTV, Twitter, VEVO and Yahoo!,

On the surface, it appears that Pandora, despite its head start of at least a decade on most of its competitors, is facing an uphill battle. It’s not just the number of services that are potentially coming online but also the number of songs and the amount of data those services are offering up to consumers. The Echo Nest, which powers personalization for Spotify (among others), boasts data on more than 35 million songs (which is why Spotify’s library is able to hold more than 20 million songs). Upstart Senzari says its new MusicGraph platform contains around 20 million songs. Gracenote has data on more than 130 million.

The new round of funding was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation by former investors Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The new funds will mostly go toward expanding the company’s sales and marketing team, but also will go toward improving its platform further.

The company points out that its music platform will now give developers the ability to include accurate tour information from JamBase, lyrical interpretations from SongMeanings users, song lyrics from LyricFind, music from both Spotify & Rdio, concert tickets information from Seatwave, and social media integration with Twitter and Facebook.Founded in 2005, the Somerville, Mass.-based startup has raised a total of $8.3 million in funding from Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab.

The Finnish mobile giant has partnered with The Echo Nest to deliver the service, using its technology to recommend music to Nokia Lumia owners based on their musical preferences. The small browser app works with your tastes, generates a profile based on your favourite tracks and artists and will then generate personalized radio stations for you to enjoy.
The service is integrated into Nokia’s updated Music app, which will also include an MP3 store, live concert recommendations and 100 stations programmed by what Nokia calls ‘music experts and influencers’.

This tie-up with The Echo Nest is part of EMI Music’s OpenEMI initiative, focused on digital innovation and improving and streamlining the music licensing process for new digital applications in a way that is flexible and adaptive for developers.
The Echo Nest and EMI have created a ’sandbox‘ for application developers, hosted and managed by The Echo Nest, which offers developers creative briefs and opportunities to collaborate on building apps for EMI’s artists including Gorillaz, Pet Shop Boys, Tinie Tempah, Professor Green, Eliza Doolittle, Chiddy Bang, The Japanese Popstars and many more to follow.

Created by Facebook partner engineer Matt Kelly, the as-yet-unreleased app pulls the music preferences of friends that have RSVP’d to a particular event, then uses Rdio’s music library to create a playlist combining their tastes.
Attendees who forgot to RSVP (or just show up out of the blue) can text their preferences to a number via Twilio to have their songs added to the party playlist in near-real-time, as well.

Echo Nest’s ‘Musical Brain’ platform analyzes millions of blog posts, reviews, as well as tracks themselves, and provides the data to online music apps, which use it to build “smarter” music apps. For instance, MOG uses the technology to suggest playlists to users that include tracks similar to those that the user selects, while Spotify has hired Echo Nest in the past in order to provide better recommendations for what songs a user should listen to based on their listening history.

The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform, which was created by two MIT Media Lab PhD students, intelligently interprets audio signals and can tell when a song belongs to the blues genre rather than a techno genre.